Sunday, November 27, 2011

An Order Clearly Spoken


While browsing the wares of an embroidery shop I discovered a spool of olive thread. And the thread just spoke to me; it felt like a scene in a film, when an old relic speaks to an ordinary guy and he goes to pull a sword from a stone or what not.

The word the thread spoke to me was "Baetis". I dared not disobey such a clear order, and so I purchased the thread and went home to tie some medium sized olives.


Baetis parachute
#16 Dohiku 301 dry fly hook
8/0 UNI thread tan
Coq de León tails
Olive embroidery thread body
Tiemco Aero Dry Wing wingpost
Hare dubbing for thorax
Olive dyed rooster hackle

6 comments:

  1. A wonderful fly.
    In Spain a lot of flytyer use gutermann thread for flies but usualy use silk.
    A great blog, congratulations.
    Miguel.

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  2. You were wise to respond to the calling...those are lovely looking flies!

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  3. Thanks Miguel (tu blog me gusta mucho tambien! :) and EMB!

    The silk Güterman thread is pretty neat too, but it was not available in this particular shade of Olive. I just had to have this one. You should have seen me licking the spool in the embroidery shop to see it wet!

    J.

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  4. Cracking flies, its good to yield to the urge.

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  5. Hi all!

    There is a great tradition here in Spain to use Gütermann natural silk for tying our traditional spanish wet flies, and we use these silk to tie dry flies too.

    So the color chart had about one thousand different colors twenty years ago, and there are very rare colors with a halo of mysticism around them, like Chadwick's 477.

    Nowdays some of these colors are impossible to get, so we use Gütermann Sulky as a substitute (also Madeira rayon and others). If you can get Sulky and you like this material I would like to recommend you some colors: 1025, 1055, 1104, 1149, 1156, 1159, 1212, 1227, 1228, 1128, 1270, 1313, 1508 (for dries, wets and nymphs).

    Enjoy!! Abel.

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  6. Thanks Abel,

    that is an interesting insight - over here the traditional body material is dubbing and I felt very smart having "discovered" the Gütermann threads by myself.

    Only confirms my suspicion that the Spanish fly tying tradition is greatly underapreciated.

    Cheers!

    J.

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